An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector (literature books to read TXT) 📕

Pain is the mystery. One of my former pupils who is fifteen by now had bought a carnation to put it in his buttonhole and go to a party. A party, my God, the world is a party that ends in death and in the scent of a wilted carnation in a buttonhole. I love you, God, precisely because I don’t know if you exist. I want a sign that you exist. I knew an ordinary woman who didn’t ask herself questions about God: she loved beyond the question about God. So God existed. When I die I want carnations attached to my white dress. But not jasmine, which I love so much and which would suffocate my death. After my death I’ll only wear white. And I’ll meet the one I want: the person I want will also be wearing white.

And sometimes she’d nod off with her hand resting on the table, on the coffee cup.

That was when she entered a phase — was it a phase or forever?—in which she went backward as if she’d lost everything she’d gained. And really — she was wondering ungratefully — what had she gained? Nothing, she replied with hate, she didn’t know why, for Ulisses.

God, yes: she’d gained in a new way: loving his impersonal vastness and only wanting Him to exist. But she was starting to lose this too: now she was violently rejecting a God she couldn’t plead with. But she also didn’t want to plead to Him: she was lost and confused. She remembered that she’d asked Ulisses one day:

— Do you believe in the God?

He’d laughed:

— You’re still stuck on those teenage questions? The question is childish. This is the answer: I feel that I am not moving through life inside an absolute emptiness precisely because I too am God. One day, when I can be bothered and if you’re still interested, I’ll tell you how I move inside God.

Recalling it now, she was surprised to see Ulisses as a stranger to her, a different being, as if she no longer knew him so well. She remembered that he’d added in order to conclude the discussion about God:

— In any case, he’d said in an impersonal way, as if not speaking of himself, I’m one of those people who believe in the unbelievable. I learned to live with whatever can’t be understood.

She thought that Ulisses wasn’t telling her anything and kept calmly contradicting himself: which made him, in her eyes, the model of a human being. He’d write poems because it was the most profound exercise of man. And what about her? What did she do as a profound exercise of being a person? She did the sea in the morning . . . In the past she didn’t go to the beach out of idleness and also because she didn’t like crowds. Now she went without any laziness at five in the morning, when the smell of the still unused sea would make her dizzy with joy. The tangy salt air — maresia, a feminine word, though for Lóri the salty smell was masculine. She’d go at five in the morning because that was the hour of the sea’s great solitude. Sometimes on the sidewalk she’d pass a man walking his dog, no one else. How to explain that the sea was her maternal cradle but that the smell was all masculine? Maybe it was the perfect fusion. Moreover, at dawn, the caps of the waves looked much whiter.

It was to the world of perfumes that Lóri had awoken. When she’d come back from the street at night, she’d pass a nearby house full of night jessamine, which is like jasmine, but stronger. She’d inhale the smell of jessamine which was nocturnal. And the perfume would seem to kill her slowly. She was fighting it, for she sensed that the perfume was stronger than she was, and that in some way she might die of it. Now was the time she was noticing all this. She was an initiate into the world.

Which seemed like a miracle to her. Not that she believed in miracles, she was the type who spends her whole life rolling stones, and not the type for whom pebbles arrive ready, polished, and white. Though she’d always had fleeting visions, real scenes that would vanish, before falling asleep. But she’d mentioned them to Ulisses and he’d explained that it was a very common phenomenon called eidetic images, and which was the ability to project unconscious images into a hallucinatory field.

Miracles, no. But coincidences. She was living off coincidences, living off lines that kept meeting and crossing and, where they crossed, would form a light and instantaneous point, so light and instantaneous that it was mostly made of secret. As soon as she’d spoken of coincidences, she was already speaking of nothing.

But she did possess a miracle. The miracle of the leaves. She’d be walking down the street and the wind would drop one right on her hair: that line of incidence of millions of leaves transformed into the one that was falling, and of millions of people it would happen to her. This would happen so often that she modestly started to consider herself the leaves’ chosen one. With fleeting gestures, she’d pluck the leaf from her hair and stow it in her purse, like the tiniest diamond. Until one day, opening her purse, she’d found among the thousands of things she always carried the dry, curled, dead leaf. She’d thrown it away: she wasn’t interested in keeping the dead fetish as a souvenir. And also because she knew that new leaves would coincide with her. One day a falling leaf landed on her eyelashes. Right then she saw God as immensely tactful.

With Ulisses she’d taken the first steps toward some thing she hadn’t known before. But could she now make progress by herself? At one of their last meetings she’d asked him with an embarrassed smile, trying to hide behind a lightly